As well they might have done. For Matilda, though she remained unstintingly loyal to the Holy Father, the benefits of securing the friendship of Henry, her overlord and second-cousin, were obvious — not least because, with the death of her mother the previous year, she now ruled alone as the protectress of her lands. Hugh, meanwhile, in his concern to see his godson redeemed from the yawning jaws of hell, felt little call to consider what impact Henry’s absolution might have upon Gregory’s plans and hopes for the reordering of the fallen world. The monks of Cluny, after all, were already as close to an angelic state as it was possible for flesh and blood to be. Far from labouring to bring the remainder of humanity to share in their own miraculous condition, their instinct had always been instead to man the ramparts of their abbey. Whereas Gregory did not hesitate to charge seasoned warriors such as Erlembald to fight for the cause of reform from their saddles, Hugh would invariably urge the opposite course upon them, and encourage any penitent knight to swap his mail coat for a cowl. Indeed, the glamour and mystique of Cluny’s name being what it was, even dukes, on occasion, had been known to abandon their princedoms for the abbey’s cloisters. ‘The shepherds flee, as do the dogs who are the protectors of their flocks,’ Gregory, in naked frustration, had once raged at Hugh. ‘Only take or receive a duke into the quiet of Cluny, and you will be leaving a hundred thousand Christians without a guardian!’ Even though the Pope knew both himself and the abbot to be allies in a common struggle, there were times, desolating times, when he feared that they might be pulling in opposite directions. At such moments, the knowledge of how alone he was with all his responsibilities would bear down on him in a peculiarly crushing manner. ‘For we bear a huge weight not only of spiritual but also of temporal concerns; and we daily fear our falling under the impending burden, for in this world we can in no way find means of help and support.’ Such was the bleak confession that Gregory had made to Hugh back in 1074, during the very first year of his papacy. He might well have repeated it, and with even more justice, at Canossa.
Certainly, his delay in calling Henry in from the cold was not, as his critics would subsequently allege, the expression of a stiff-necked arrogance, but rather of irresolution, perplexity and self-doubt. Gregory, that man of iron certitude, did not know what to do. The king’s manoeuvre had comprehensively outflanked him. As a result, he found himself confronted by an agonising dilemma. Absolve Henry, Gregory knew, and all the confidence that the German princes had placed in him would inevitably be betrayed. Refuse to show the humbled king mercy, however, and he would be betraying the duty that he owed to the Almighty Himself: to serve Him as the channel of His forgiveness and grace. Such a consideration, in the end, had to be reckoned paramount. So it was, on the third day of Henry’s penitence, that the Holy Father duly gave the guards on the gates the nod. The king was admitted into the castle at last, blessed with a kiss, and invited to Mass. Yet all along, in the back of Gregory’s mind, the dread would have lurked that he was being fooled, that he had been outsmarted, that his adversary had triumphed.
An anxiety, it seems, that was gnawing at Henry too. Entering his cousin’s stronghold, his stomach was knotted up. When he and Gregory sat down together to mark their reconciliation with a meal, the occasion was not a success. No blame for this could possibly have been attached to the standard of fare on offer: for the Lady Matilda was heir to a long line of gourmands, and the balsamic vinegar of Canossa, in particular, was internationally renowned. Both Pope and king, however, showed precious little appetite. Gregory, as ascetic as ever, contented himself with the odd nibble at a herb or two; while Henry as well, despite his three days of penance, ate barely a mouthful. His discomfort, perhaps, was only to be expected. Feasts, which should properly have been rituals for bringing home to his subjects the full scale of his royal dignity and power, had all too often ended up emphasising the very opposite. Back when he was young, his guests had regularly amused themselves by having punch-ups over the seating arrangements. On one notorious occasion, indeed, two bishops had brought in rival gangs of heavies to help decide which of them should have the precedence. On another, a group of monks, indignant at Henry’s gifting of their monastery to the Archbishop of Cologne, had gatecrashed the royal hall and vandalised the dinner table, in full view of all the court. Unsurprisingly, then, any hint of awkwardness at a meal tended not to bring out the best in the king. Now that he had secured what he wanted from Gregory, he certainly had no wish to linger any longer than he had to at the scene of his humiliation. After one further summit with the Pope, held near by at a second of Matilda’s strongholds, Henry was off. By April, after a hurried tour of northern Italy, he was back in the Reich.
Where, already, Gregory’s dark forebodings about how the German princes might respond to his absolution of the king were proving themselves all too justified. Henry’s enemies, brought the news of Canossa, had reacted to it with astonishment and consternation. Barely a month after receiving Gregory’s half-defiant, half-apologetic justification of his decision, the rebel princes had met in grim-faced assembly in Franconia, in the town of Forcheim. There, rather than wait for Gregory himself to arrive in Germany, as had previously been their intention, they
